The invention relates generally to material handling equipment and more specifically to a material handling conveyor for separating, reorienting and transferring material such as rods, tubes, and the like. In innumerable industrial applications, various automatic and semi-automatic machines have all but replaced manual labor in high volume, repetitive production tasks. While many such machines, characterized typically by injection molding machines, require bulk material which can be easily loaded, numerous other classes of machines utilize material in preforms. For example, machines for high volume production of glass vials and ampoules utilize hollow cylindrical glass stock and effect the formation of the articles by application of heat, axial tension and radial compression. Due to certain well appreciated characteristics of glass, practical handling considerations dictate a maximum length to the glass tubes which may be utilized by such vial and ampoule fabricating machines. Typically, these machines will utilize approximately a 5 foot length of glass from which a plurality of vials or ampoules are formed.
The manufacture of vials and ampoules from such a preform necessitates the repeated loading of the production machine with a length of glass tubing. This repeated reloading of the vial machine is a significant obstacle to maximum production of an otherwise fully automatic machine. For example, the loading operation clearly requires the presence of an operator. The operator's presence is, however, only required a small portion of time in order to reload the empty fabrication stations. This, of course, suggests that one operator can man several machines. However, reloading requirements are best described as being random and should two fabrication stations on two separate machines require simultaneous attention, it is clear that, with only a single operator, one machine will go momentarily unattended resulting in an empty fabrication station and a loss of a fabricated article. Such an empty station not only reduces production, but also ultimately increases its cost and the cost of the articles as well.
The prior art offers solutions to this problem. One approach has been to include indexable turrets at each fabrication station which rotate upon demand to provide a fresh length of glass tubing. Typically, such turrets will receive and dispense up to five lengths of glass tubing, thus significantly increasing the interval during which the machine may function unattended and improve its productivity since the likelihood that the machine will operate with one or more empty fabrication stations is substantially reduced. It should be apparent, however, that such a sophisticated turret arrangement not only depends upon the presence but also the skill of an operator. In fact, the skill necessary to load a machine having turrets is much greater than that required to load a machine which is not so equipped due to the close proximity of the receiving means in the turrets. Secondly, a machine equipped with turrets will necessarily be more complex than a machine lacking them, inasmuch as each individual fabrication station must include the turrets, sensing means to determine the exhaustion of a length of tubing and means to index the turret and supply a new length of tubing.